ROM Hacking DiscussionGeneral discussions about all things fan games. Topics relating to both ROM hacks and custom games are welcome here. Posting links to ROMs is illegal and is not tolerated anywhere on the forum.

I'm looking for any recommendations on programs for hacking or development that work on a Mac computer. I recently got a Mac and was excited to start downloading RPG Maker/Pokemon Essentials and get back to work... until I learned RPG Maker wasn't compatible with Mac, and from the sound of it, neither are hacking programs. I was considering getting VM, but Essentials only runs with XP (which I already purchased), so I'm kind of stuck.

Does anyone know of any programs for building Pokemon games that DO run on Mac? If not, are there any reliable ways to run Windows on my Mac? I searched around on the forums a bit and have heard a couple things mentioned, but it seems there's mixed results.

At the end of the day, I do still have my Windows computer, but it's pretty crummy and has a lot of functionality issues, which is why I would prefer to find some way to work things out on my Mac. Thanks in advance for any advice!

Gaddamnit, I typed out a long reply to this post but it got erased because I tried to include a link. To summarize what I had said:

You can use Wine or a variant of it to run .exe files on MacOS! I'd love to go in to detail on how to use Wine (or my preferred program, Wineskin) to run executables.

More importantly, what type of tool are you looking for? I'm using the wonderful Gen III Rom Hacking Suite by karatekid552 for Pokémon modification and sprite insertion. It's available on Mac, thankfully! I run A-Map and other .exe files by wrapping them.

Let me know what you need, I'd love to share what I've found out recently!

Gaddamnit, I typed out a long reply to this post but it got erased because I tried to include a link. To summarize what I had said:

You can use Wine or a variant of it to run .exe files on MacOS! I'd love to go in to detail on how to use Wine (or my preferred program, Wineskin) to run executables.

More importantly, what type of tool are you looking for? I'm using the wonderful Gen III Rom Hacking Suite by karatekid552 for Pokémon modification and sprite insertion. It's available on Mac, thankfully! I run A-Map and other .exe files by wrapping them.

Let me know what you need, I'd love to share what I've found out recently!

I'm personally leaning more towards getting RPG Maker to work since I've already bought it and I'm familiar with how it works, but I'm open to rom hacking tools as well! I'd have to do a bit more research into rom hacking specifically to understand what tools exactly I need. I'll try checking out Wine and see if I can get that to work. If you have advice for that, it would be super helpful! I've always had Windows so I've never had to try and mess around with this kind of stuff before.

Thank you for the recommendations you've given me so far! I'll take a look at them and read a bit more about hacking to see if I can get an idea for what I need if I go that route.

I'm also working on my fan game on a mac.
I use Parallels Desktop, it costs money, but you can probably find it on the internet for free.
Although I do recommend buying it.
There's also a trial version too.
Paralleld desktop is a virtual machine, you can run windows and mac at the same time.
You can also use android and linux with parallels.
Other options would be:
Bootcamp, it reboots your mac and instead of using macOS, it'll run windows;
Virtual Machine, it's like parallels, it's just less popular;
Wine, it runs .exe files, it works almost all the time except for some programs.

I'm gonna back up rheometric on using Wine. For years, RPGXP via Wine lacked a lot of crucial functionality, like copy and paste, but since getting a new mac and re-buying XP through steam, everything is working absolutely fine. (Don't buy through steam though. Steam makes everything ten times more of a hassle.) When Wine was giving me trouble, I dabbled in Crossover and Bootcamp, but I think Wine is the easiest and most effective emulator since it seems to have fixed its previous issues in functionality.

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